Double Confirmed: Philip Rosedale's High Fidelity Building "A New Kind of Virtual Reality Platform" - As Are Many Others

"Our mission is to create a new kind of virtual reality platform," announces Philip Rosedale on the blog of his new company, High Fidelity, officially confirming what some of us up to now have just inferred: Philip is basically building Third Life. It will probably incorporate a voxel-based 3D graphics engine, and gesture-based controls. (He also wants to hire a full-time graphics engineer, so update your resume, kids.) I'm planning to talk with Philip about his vision very soon, but it's interesting that he's doing this at the same time others are pushing to create new virtual reality platforms of their own. Overall, this feels like a real trend, made possible by continued leaps in computer power, especially related to 3D graphics, and their continued drop in price. It reminds me of something someone told me a few years ago, when Second Life's hype wave was on the wane. Don't worry, he said, this is just the first generation of something much bigger, which will come into its own as the technology to drive it evolves.

Hope this gets somewhere, although I guess we should not just immediately assume :

- High Fidelity is a new persistent user explorable world like SL
- That it necessarily would feature UGC at all
- That it is a product for users, not a technological platform for developers
- That it solely relates to virtual worlds, rather than being about VR or AR